Thursday, November 01, 2007

Danah Boyd re-builds walls on Facebook

When will people wake up and realise that having networks that are too transparent is a very real problem. Information - including social info - is all about context. The exact same thing goes for the debate over privacy and ID cards (vs supermarket loyalty cards, say) - one context, a shop, may be ok. Another context, a government, is a completely different matter because they're up to completely different activities. I can give my mobile number to my doctor, but not to marketing companies.

I'm not sure whether you can actually manage contexts in a formal, technical fashion such as an SNS would be based on. ICT is based more on "openness" and ease of information transfer than on information expiring, being blocked, etc. Privacy does not come easily under network capitalism.